Iran was India's seventh-largest supplier of crude oil for the first nine months of the financial year that began April 1, slipping from third position after U.S. and European sanctions spurred India's refiners to cut their imports from the Persian Gulf country and expand procurement from other countries.
Iran
was
India
's
seventh-largest supplier of crude oil for the first nine months of the
financial year that began April 1, slipping from third position after
U.S.
and
European sanctions spurred
India
's
refiners to cut their imports from the
Persian Gulf
country and expand procurement from other countries.
India usually doesn't make public the amount of crude it imports from
individual countries, but junior oil minister Panabaaka Lakshmi provided the
data as a written reply on Friday to lawmakers who requested the information in
the lower house of the parliament.
Iran
supplied 9.7 million tons of crude to
India
in
the nine-month period. While the government didn't provide comparative figures
for April-December of the last financial year, it said that for the full year
ended
March 31, 2012
,
Iran
was
India
's
third-largest supplier of crude.
Sanctions imposed by the
U.S.
and
European Union have cut off the payment route for
Iran
's
crude supplies. Since
India
can't
deposit dollars or euros to any foreign bank for the importing of Iranian
crude, payment has been restricted to rupee deposits in Indian banks, which
Iran
can
use to buy goods in
India
. So
far,
Iran
has
found it difficult to find enough goods to buy with its rupee payments.
Refiners are also getting cagey about importing from
Iran
.
P.P. Upadhya, managing director of Mangalore Refinery & Petrochemicals
Ltd.,
India
's
largest importer of Iranian crude, said in an interview with The Wall Street
Journal on Thursday that they might be forced to stop oil imports from the
Persian
Gulf
nation if it can't renew the insurance on its refinery.
Local insurers have been reluctant to take the risk of providing insurance to
refineries processing Iranian crude, as they are mainly dependent on
reinsurance in overseas markets to hedge their insurance risk. Global
reinsurers are staying away due to Western sanctions on Iran-related financial
transactions.
For the April-December period, Saudi Arabia retained its position as India's
main crude supplier, selling 24.8 million tons, followed by Iraq at 17.2
million tons, Venezuela at 15.1 million tons, Kuwait at 13.2 million tons,
United Arab Emirates at 11.4 million tons and Nigeria at 9.9 million tons.
India
's
total oil imports were 134 million tons over April-December, valued at $104.54
billion.
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